End Game d-8 Read online

  Starship reached for his cup of the crankcase oil the sailors claimed was coffee. As he did, the Werewolf's flight control computer buzzed with a warning — the radar had caught sight of an aircraft approaching from the north. Before the pilot could react, the screen flashed a proximity warning — the airplane was heading at a high rate of speed on a direct vector toward him; he had thirty seconds to evade.

  Starship pushed the Werewolf stick to the left, starting an easy circle away from the airplane's flight path. The computer had been programmed to be overanxious so that the Navy newbies he was training didn't fly into anything; he wasn't really in any danger of a collision. But it was curious that the other plane was flying so low. As he banked parallel to its flight path, the radar caught sight of three other airplanes, all at very low altitude and obviously following the leader.

  "Tac, I have something unusual here. Four aircraft very low to the water, no running lights, no radar — can I follow them and find out what's going on?"

  "Hold tight, Werewolf."

  Old farts.

  * * *

  Captain Harold "Storm" Gale stared at the holographic display on the bridge of the Abner Read. The three-dimensional projection rose from a table behind the helmsman's station and could be used for a variety of purposes. In this case, it was taking various sensor data to render a map of the area they were patrolling. The Abner Read, in green, sat at the right-hand corner. The smuggler the Werewolf had spotted — yellow — was toward the center, with the tanker another yellow block beyond it. There were no aircraft.

  "I don't see any airplanes," Storm told Eyes. "You're sure Airforce got it right?"

  "He has them on his radar," said Eyes.

  Storm reached to the communication control on his belt, flipping into the Werewolf circuit. The wireless communications system allowed him to talk to all of the ship's departments directly.

  "Airforce, what are we looking at here?"

  "Four unidentified aircraft, flying low and fast."

  "What types are they?"

  "Not sure. I haven't seen—" "Get closer." "Tac just told me—" "Get closer!"

  Storm flipped back to Eyes. "Have Airforce find out what the aircraft are."

  "What about the boat, Captain?"

  "A single smuggler, no weapons visible?"

  "Affirmative, Captain. He's twenty minutes away, at our present course and speed."

  "Threat to the oil tanker?"

  "Doesn't appear so."

  "Have the Werewolf pursue the airplanes. We'll set a course for the smuggler in the meantime." "Aye aye, Captain."

  * * *

  The computer estimated the aircraft were moving at 280 knots. The computer calculated the lead aircraft's likely course based on the past observations — a straight line toward the eastern tip of Somalia.

  "Werewolf, please close on the bandits and identify," said Eyes.

  Gee, no kidding, thought Starship.

  "Tac, be advised these aircraft are now out of my sensor range. It'd be helpful if you turned on your radar and gave me a hand."

  "Negative. We're staying dark."

  "Do we have an Orion above?" asked Starship. As the words came out of his mouth, he realized the answer was going to be negative — the radar planes had been pulled off the gulf duty two days before, sent to Europe to help in the Kosovo mess.

  "We're on our own."

  "Yeah, roger that. OK, I'm maneuvering to follow." Starship arced behind the planes and revved his engines to max power.

  More smugglers, probably, though the fact that there were four of them was curious. He could guess that they weren't combatants; the planes were too small and slow.

  Five minutes later, with the aircraft still out of sight, Star-ship asked the computer to recompute his targets' course and probable location. The computer declared that they should be five miles dead ahead. They weren't, and when five more minutes passed and he didn't fly through them, Starship told Tac the obvious.

  "Looks like we lost them. They probably put the pedal to the metal as soon as they picked me up on radar."

  "Repeat?"

  "I believe they accelerated away. My screen is clear." "You're sure they're gone?" "Either that or I just flew through them." "Stand by, Werewolf," said Eyes, his voice dripping with venom.

  "It wasn't my fault I lost them, Commander. They had a head start. If you'd allowed me to chase them when I wanted to—"

  "Stand by," snapped the other man.

  Starship continued southward; he was about sixty miles from Tohen, a tiny village on the northeastern tip of Somalia. Port Somalia — an oil terminal port built by the Indians and not yet fully operational — was another ten miles to the southeast.

  "Airforce — what's your story?" barked Storm, coming onto the communications line. "Lost them, Captain." "Where are you?"

  The captain knew precisely where he was. It wasn't a question but an accusation: Why didn't you do what I wanted you to do? Starship read off the GPS coordinates, then translated them into a rough position off Somalia.

  "According to the computer, the aircraft are about a half hour from Somalia. Among the possible targets—"

  "Somalia's not my problem," answered Storm. "Go back north and find that smuggler."

  "Your call." "Excuse me?"

  "Aye aye, Captain. Werewolf turning north."

  Las Vegas University of Medicine,

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  5 January 1998

  0825

  "You're early!"

  Zen shrugged as he wheeled his way across the thick rug of Dr. Michael Vasin's office. "Yeah, figured I'd get it over with."

  "Tea?"

  "Coffee if you have it, sure."

  Vasin picked up the phone on his desk and asked his assistant to bring them some. Then he got up and walked to the nearby couch, shifting around as Zen maneuvered his wheelchair catty-corner to him. Indian by birth, the doctor spoke with a pronounced accent, even though he had been in America since college.

  "And everything square with work?"

  "Squared away," Zen told him. The doctor did not know the specifics of what Zen did, officially anyway. But he was friends with one of Dreamland's most important scientific researchers, Dr. Martha Geraldo, who had referred Zen to him for the experimental program. So he probably knew a little, though neither man tested the specifics of that knowledge.

  Vasin's assistant came in with a tray of herbal tea, coffee, and two small cups. She was a petite, older woman, efficient at handling minutiae and thoughtful enough to ask after Zen's wife, whom she had never met. When she left, Zen found Vasin staring out the large windows behind his desk. The Vegas Strip lay in the distance.

  "The desert is not a good place for gamblers," said the doctor absently.

  Unsure how to respond, Zen said nothing.

  "Jeff, I want you to understand, there are no guarantees with this. It may have absolutely no effect on you. Absolutely no effect. Even if regenerating nerve cells in the spine is possible, it might not work in your case for a million different reasons."

  "I understand."

  Vasin had already told him this many times.

  "And, as we've discussed, there is always the possibility there will be side effects that we don't know about," continued the doctor.

  "I read everything you gave me."

  "I'm repeating myself." Vasin turned around, smiling self-deprecatingly. "I want you to understand it emotionally. There's always a possibility — unforeseen — that things could be worse."

  Zen had already sat through two long lectures from Vasin and another by one of the researchers on his team outlining the potential pitfalls and dangers of the technique. He had also signed a stack of release forms.

  "I'm about as aware of the dangers as I can be."

  "Yes." Vasin rose. "Ready to get the ball rolling?"

  "I thought you'd never ask."

  Air Force High Technology Advanced Weapons Center

  (Dreamland)

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bsp; 1100

  Lieutenant Colonel Tecumseh "Dog" Bastian checked his altitude and location, then radioed to the event controller, who was sitting inside a highly modified Boeing RC-135, circling above at forty thousand feet.

  "Dreamland Raptor to Event Command — Jerry, are we firing this missile today?"

  "Event Command to Dreamland Raptor, we're still hanging on Dreamland Levitow," answered the controller, referring to the EB-52 that was to fire the target missile. "Colonel, you sound like you're anxious to get back to your paperwork."

  Not at all, thought Dog, who greatly preferred his present office — the cockpit of Dreamland's experimental long-range attack version of the F-22 Raptor — to the one with his cherrywood desk twenty thousand feet below. Flying cutting-edge aircraft was undoubtedly the best part of Dreamland.

  The F-22 bore only a passing resemblance to the "stock" model. Its wings had been made into long deltas; in the place of a tailfin it had a faceted quadrangle of triangles over the elongated tailpipe. The plane was twenty feet longer than the original, allowing it to accommodate an internal bomb bay that could be filled with a variety of weapons, including the one Dog was waiting to launch. The length also allowed the plane to carry considerably more fuel than a regular F-22.

  "All right, Dreamland Raptor, we're proceeding," said the event controller. "Dreamland Levitow is on course. They are firing test missile one….Test missile has been launched. We are proceeding with our event."

  Test missile one was an AGM-86C whose explosive warhead had been replaced with a set of instruments and a broadcasting device. Also known as an Air Launched Cruise Missile, or ALCM, the AGM-86C was the conventional version of the frontline nuclear-tipped cruise missile developed during the 1980s and placed into storage with the reorganization of the nuclear force in the early 1990s. In this case, the missile was playing the role of a nuclear weapon.

  The missile in Dog's bomb bay was designed to render such weapons obsolete. The EEMWB — the letters stood for Enhanced ElectroMagnetic Warfare Bomb, but were generally pronounced together as "em-web" — created an electronic pulse that disrupted electric devices within a wide radius. Unlike the devices that had been used against power grids in Iraq during the 1992 Gulf War, the EEMWB used terahertz radiation — known as T-Rays or T Waves — to do its damage. Conventional electronic shielding did not protect against them, since until now there had been no need to. Occupying the bandwidth between infrared and microwave radiation, T-Rays were potentially devastating, yet extremely difficult to control and direct. While their potential had long been recognized, their use remained only the wishful daydream of weapons scientists and armchair generals.

  Until now. The Dreamland weapons people had found a way to use carefully fabricated metal shards as antennas as the pulse was generated. Computer simulations showed they could design weapons that would fry circuitry at five hundred miles.

  There were two likely applications. One was as a weapon to paralyze an enemy's electronics, a kind of super E bomb that would affect everything from power grids to wrist-watches. The other was a defense against nuclear weapons such as the one the AGM-86C simulated. The EEMWB's pulse went through the shielding in conventional nuclear weapons that protected them from "conventional" electromagnetic shocks. By wiping out the nanoswitches and all other control gear in the weapons, the EEMWB prevented the weapon from going off.

  It was possible to shield devices against the T-Rays— both Dreamland Raptor and Dreamland Levitow were proof. But the process was painstaking, especially for anything in the air.

  Dog's EEMWB had a fifty-mile radius. If successful, tests would begin in the South Pacific two weeks from now on the larger, five-hundred-mile-radius designs.

  "Dreamland Raptor, prepare to fire EEMWB," said the event controller.

  "Dreamland Raptor acknowledges." The EEMWB's propulsion and guidance units came from AGM-86Cs, and it was fired more like a bomb than an antiair weapon, with the extra step of designating an altitude for an explosion.

  "Launch at will," said the event coordinator. "Launching."

  * * *

  Jan Stewart glanced at the screen at the left side of the control panel on her EB-52, checking the sitrep screen for her position and the location of the Dreamland landing area, now about fifteen miles away and due south. If the shielding failed when the EEMWB exploded, she would have to fly Dreamland Levitow back to base by dead reckoning on manual control — not a prospect she relished.

  Actually, Captain Stewart didn't relish flying the Levi-tow, or any Megafortress, much at all. She'd been a B-1 jock and had come to Dreamland to work in a project designed to test the B-1 for conversion similar to the EB-52 Megafortress. A week after she arrived, the project's funding was cut and she was pressed into the Megafortress program as a copilot. She outranked a lot of the other copilots and even pilots in the program, but because she was a low-timer in the aircraft, she'd been relegated to second seat by the program's temporary head, Captain Breanna Stockard. Worse, Breanna had made Stewart her copilot.

  Bad enough to fly what was still essentially a B-52 after the hotter-than-fire B-1B. Worse — much, much worse — to be second officer after running the show.

  Today, though, Stewart was boss. Her nemesis had been scrubbed at the last minute due to a snowstorm in Chicago.

  "EEMWB detonation in twenty seconds," said Lieutenant Sergio "Jazz" Jackson, who was serving as her copilot.

  "Yup."

  A tone sounded in her headphones, indicating that the weapon had detonated. Stewart hot-keyed her communications unit to tell the event commander, but got no response.

  She pulled back on the stick slightly, but the airplane failed to move.

  Had the shielding failed?

  Only partially — her configurable control panel was still lit. She'd go to manual control right away.

  Interphone working?

  "Prepare for manual control," she said.

  "Manual?" said Jazz.

  Immediately, Stewart realized what had happened— she'd turned the aircraft over to the flight control computer for the missile launch as part of the test protocol, and neglected to take it back.

  It was a boneheaded mistake that would cost her at least two rounds of beers. Thank God the Iron Bitch hadn't been here to see it.

  "I mean, taking over control from the computer," Stewart told Jazz lamely.

  "That's what I thought," said the copilot.

  "Dreamland Levitow," said the event controller. "Please repeat your transmission. I'm sorry — we were caught up in something here."

  I'll bet, thought Stewart, not entirely convinced that Bre-anna hadn't somehow conspired with them to make her look bad.

  * * *

  Dr. Ray Rubeo, Dreamland's head scientist, was waiting for Colonel Bastian as he unfolded himself from the Raptor's cockpit.

  "So how'd we do, Doc?" Dog asked, coming down the ladder. Techies were already swarming over the Raptor, preparing it for a complete overhaul. Besides thoroughly analyzing the shielding and systems for signs of damage from the T-Rays, the engineering team was planning a number of improvements to the plane, including a new wing structure that would lower its unfueled weight by five percent.

  "It's premature to speculate," said Rubeo. "Do it anyway."

  Rubeo frowned. "I'm sure that when the results are analyzed, the models predicting the impact of the weapon will be shown to be quite correct. All of the test instruments reported full hits. And," he paused dramatically, "one of the ground technicians forgot to remove his watch, and now finds that it no longer functions."

  Dog laughed. The scientist touched his earring — a habit, the colonel knew, that meant he was planning to say something he considered unpleasant. Dog decided to head him off at the pass.

  "Ray, if the full-sized weapons won't be ready for testing—"

  "Bah. They're sitting in the bunker, all eight of them. Though the tests are unnecessary."

  Then obviously I'm about to get harangued for more mon
ey, thought Dog, starting toward the Jimmy SUV waiting to take him over to the hangar area where he could change. Sure enough, Rubeo fell in alongside him and made the pitch.

  "If you are going to proceed with the project, Colonel, I need several more technicians to assist while the team is away."

  "Can't do it, Ray. You've seen the budget."

  "Colonel, we are past squeezing water from a stone. We need more people."

  Dog stopped to watch Dreamland Levitow practicing touch and goes on the nearby runway. As part of a new policy at Dreamland, the EB-52 Megafortress had been named for Sergeant John L. Levitow, an Air Force Medal of Honor winner. A crewman in an AC-47 gunship during the Vietnam War, Sergeant Levitow had thrown himself on a live flare inside the hold of his damaged aircraft following a mortar hit. Despite numerous wounds, he managed to toss the flare outside of the aircraft before it ignited, saving the entire plane.

  Rubeo renewed his pitch as the plane passed overhead. "Colonel — we need more people."

  "If the EEMWB project gets funding, we'll have more slots."

  "Only if it's approved as part of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Program, which it shouldn't be."

  Rubeo had made this point before: The EEMWB was not a good ABM weapon, since the lead in technology would last, by his estimate, no longer than five years. And it was not selective — everything in the area was disabled, not just the target. Dog didn't disagree, but he didn't see that as an argument against proceeding with the weapon, which would provide a decent solution until other technologies matured. And he especially thought this was a good idea since it would help him get the people Rubeo needed.

  "We have to be practical," said Dog.

  "Colonel, I'm the most practical scientist I know."

  "That isn't saying much, Ray," Dog told him, climbing into the truck.

  Near Port Somalia

  5 January 1998

  2304

  Captain Sattari felt the slight burn at the top of his shoulders as he paddled in unison with the others, propelling the small boat toward their target. The wind came at them from the west, trying to push them off course. They compensated for it as they stroked, but the boat still drew a jagged line forward.